Are we really who we say we are, Lindsay? 

At first blush, it felt like a strange question coming from a 20+ year old company. 

Building the company from scratch, the founder launched his brand into the world during a time where building businesses felt easier. The markets weren’t saturated with brands and content. People still expected handshakes and in-person meetings, and when you said you were x, y, z, people believed it until you gave them reason to believe otherwise. 

And this company? They never gave anyone a reason to believe otherwise. Ever. 

Founded in the early 2000s, this company was different from the start. The founder, an HR consultant, built a company with his convictions and his values front and center – bold and without apology. Every client, every hire, every service was weighed and measured through those convictions. For more than two decades, he lived in action what most companies just talk about in words – and before he positioned his brand for its next era of growth, he wanted someone to peek inside at the substance of what he’d built to tell him if everything he thought was true (about himself, about his team, about his audience, about his industry, about his company) actually was true. 

The company had large marketing agencies in their network, and they had the budget to hire a team of the smartest minds. But they reached out to me because they weren’t looking for what those providers were selling. They didn’t just want to optimize their marketing or scale their performance. They wanted the type of growth and clarity that only comes out of Strategic Discernment – next-step moves structured entirely around who they were, who they are, and who they wanted to remain. 

WHAT IS STRATEGIC DISCERNMENT?

Truthfully, it’s not an easy question to answer. Because so much of that answer feels squishy in today’s quick-answer, measure-everything world. 

So, let me start with what it’s not. 

Strategic Discernment is not the bedfellow to the hot-take, quick-output, easy scroll marketing we’ve all grown pudgy on over the last 10 years. 

Found in that place where the gut and the mind meet together to identify the best path forward, Strategic Discernment is an invitation to go deeper. To be more human. To slow down to see what’s real instead of what’s desired and what’s true instead of what’s assumed.

When you say YES to the invitation offered through Strategic Discernment, you discover a resoundingly honest and values-aligned pathway to running your business and building your brand – not because your ears have been filled to the brim with feel-good ideas, but because it excavates what you didn’t even know was there and gives language to the truth you’ve been living all along. 

THE BIGGEST ROADBLOCKS TO STRATEGIC DISCERNMENT: AI AND PERFORMANCE-FIRST CULTURE

Earlier this week, I unsubscribed from a community that should have been right up my alley. For months, however, the content pushed out by the leader was consistently AI generated – and for me, that sent a clear signal: The leader didn’t have a deep well of wisdom to draw from. Instead, they were drinking from the well of AI’s borrowed knowledge –  and placing all their bets that my own well would be shallow enough for me to never stop and notice. 

But I did notice, and that noticing turned me away. 

Why such low tolerance for AI content, you ask? I give short glimpses into why here and here, but I love the way culture strategist Jasmine Bina sums it up in her article Not the AI Era. The Contract Era: 

The reason someone’s incensed that your entire blog post is written in AI-first person is because there was a contract – they give you their attention, you give them the interiority of your mind. Even if AI helps you do that better for your audience, it’s not what the reader agreed to.

We’re losing our ability to intuitively trust what we’re receiving. We don’t believe the feedback was legit, the blog post was honest, or that the apology was real because AI separates the symbol of care from the labor of care.

Since the start of the 21st century, marketers and brands have been mastering ways to manipulate this contract of trust in new, hyper-scaled ways. Because the digital landscape was sold to us with terms like relationship and community, many of us were easily tricked into believing that brand was still about audience. Most often, however, it was about building the right persona and optimizing the right algorithm to increase influence, scale, and performance.

Enamored by the tools (and the promises) of the digital world, we willingly shifted our expectations around human behavior and connection. Values and convictions became emotional props. Community turned into discussion threads. Conflict turned into delete. Now able to completely manufacture and control the order of our social worlds, we used our extra time to focus on metrics and numbers, calling it optimization, personalization, targeted. Success got measured in podcast appearances, subscriber counts, and hours (not spent) in the office.  

And all this felt really, really good. Until it stopped working. 

A TIMELINE ON HOW EVERYTHING THAT ONCE WORKED BROKE

My premise starts here: The digital age ushered large swaths of the post-industrialized world* into a new level of human need (eg.,Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs**).

Let me explain. 

The timeline of human history places most of our existence in basic survival mode – meaning for most of our time on earth, we humans have been mostly worried about food and shelter, with nearly zero hopes of escaping the identities we were born into. 

This all began to shift with the Industrial Revolution. As our world grew more stable and predictable, we were able to worry less about food and shelter and more about safety and comfort. This (said Maslow) is the natural progression of development when you’re no longer fighting for your day-to-day survival. 

By the mid 20th century, we had become safe enough to pursue the higher order needs of belonging. Social media eventually rode in on this wave, helping us to further orient our worlds around our self identities. Between the late 2010s clear up until life before Covid, all the old taboos around self help and personal development had largely fallen away. We were living affluently in the age of the influencer and had become so obsessed with our own well being that the wellness industry grew at double the rate of the GDP. Everywhere you looked and everything you listened to felt like it had the same narrative on repeat: Optimize. Optimize. Optimize. 

Basic needs: ✔️
Basic safety: ✔️
Belonging + Community: ✔️
Self respect/recognition/esteem: ✔️
Personal growth, pursuit of meaning, self-actualization:✔️

This optimized world felt good for a moment – but then, Covid showed up and forced a hard reset. Our self-made worlds dismantled. Almost overnight.

Before we could fully make sense of everything we’d lost, AI busted onto the mainstream scene – as if to make it crystal clear that the private fortresses of meaning we thought we had built were really standing on shifting sand.

Today, those of us left standing are a bit wobbly on our feet. Experts say we’re in a trust recession where everyone’s wondering what’s real and what’s trustworthy, and those still clinging to the old order of business sound a bit tone deaf. Some argue that influencer culture has died, and while some segments of culture continue to optimize for their own personal development – large swaths are back to focusing on those lower order needs of survival, safety, and belonging. 

Left grappling with this reality, it’s here where I think we meet our profound choice: We can either replay history and use all the tools at our disposal to hack our way back into self-optimization. Or, we can choose Strategic Discernment and build a strong foundation on substance and truth – so when the next unexpected wave crashes into us, we don’t lose footing on who we really are. 

In philosophy, this profound choice is actually better labeled as a Hobson’s Choice (ie., an illusion that you have options when you really only have one choice). Because as we move into the next era, the brands, the businesses, and the humans who want to survive will not be the ones best at performance and optimization. They will be the ones who are most capable of discerning what’s true – of themselves and of others. 

WHAT DOES STRATEGIC DISCERNMENT LOOK LIKE?

Yesterday, I attended a webinar that (like loads of webinars before it) proved to be a waste of my time. 

It promised to teach how to start showing up in AEO, and I expected proven tips on how to become a referenced brand in AI search. But that didn’t happen. The hosts knew essentially as much as I did – and anything they shared could have been found via a quick conversation with my own AI tool. 

It was disappointing and frustrating, but it was also confirming: We’re at the edge of an old world with old rules and we’re emerging into something new – where the rules haven’t been written yet. 

No one is a true expert in AI or AEO (at least from a business/brand-building POV) because they can’t be. We’ve not been in the game long enough to see what actually works. But few want to say that part out loud because it’s a truth that doesn’t scale.

This is the difference between Strategic Discernment and optimized, efficiency-first obsession.

My HR client asked for and invested in Strategic Discernment, not because they weren’t interested in scale or success. In fact, they very much wanted to grow, and they were very aware that they needed to market themselves better. 

But because they knew any world built on false realities is nothing but a short-lived illusion, they weren’t interested in growth or scale or performance or optimization if it meant they had to detach themselves from the mission, values, and culture that built them in the first place. 

It all reminds me of something I used to do as a kid. 

Every summer, my cousin and I would spend hours at the pool trying to figure out how to walk on water. 

We knew it was technically possible (if we could move our feet fast enough). So with a running start, we’d sprint as fast as we could across the surface, convinced that maybe we could outrun the laws beneath our feet.

For a few brief seconds, we felt like tiny, infallible gods as we outwitted reality and momentum carried us farther than it should have.

Eventually, we sank. 

Looking back, I think much of the digital age has functioned the same way. 

We moved so quickly — scaling faster, producing faster, optimizing faster, performing faster — that we allowed ourselves to think the speed itself could change our very rules of existence. And that’s how we confused visibility for trust, persona for substance, and performance for truth.

Until reality busted through our front doors and reasserted itself. 

I think this is why Strategic Discernment matters now more than ever. Not because it helps brands outpace reality, but because it’s the only thing that will keep us tethered to ourselves and others while the rest of the world tries to outrun the water.

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* Also known as Advanced Economies, High-Income Countries – or other economies that have advanced beyond agricultural, manual labor 

**Yes, yes, we now know that people and societies do not move through Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in a sequential way. But the hierarchy remains a useful heuristic for conceptualizing where we’re at and where we’ve been, especially for Post-Industrialized societies.